Away With The Fairies, by Martin Needham

In the high dry deserts of Central Asia, life is tough and the people tougher. Iskander was as tough as they come. He practised graceful  martial arts,  on the roof of his ancestral fortress. He stood unflinching  nose to hooked nose with a golden eagle he had raised from a foundling, as it sank steely iron talons into his arm. Initially it was a surprise when he spoke of fairies, but then these were no  bottom of the garden pixies; rather he described tall, angel-like ice queens, raised on the rocky glacial wastes of Nanga Parbat, the killer mountain, the obsessive graveyard of German mountaineers in the 1930s. Iskander suggested that recently, being starved of fresh mountaineers by world events, the fairies had begun to resort to scavenging mortals from the roofs of local homes.

Iskander claimed to have seen the face of a beautiful fairy staring down from the night sky with inquisitive liquid eyes as he lay awake on the perfectly air conditioned roof of his home. But then Iskander's  trade was welcoming tourists, informing them about local culture and folk lore. His closest friend, Najeem, assumed a more modern world view, having studied zoology both down- country and overseas. Najeem now worked for the World Wildlife Fund conserving local fauna. He had supported numerous film makers on the trail of ibex, snow leopards and Marco Polo sheep. Najeem poured scorn on the idea of fairies and suggested the Himalayan griffon vulture, which dwarfed Iskander's golden eagle, to be a much more likely perpetrator. Najeem lavished scientific attention on the facts, searching for patterns in the details of the three disappeared young men, each lost upon a full moon. He looked for tracks, trails and traces. He plotted a single flight path of incidences on the map, as straight as the crow flies from the lonely Targott tree at the start of the highest irrigation channel on the far side of the valley to the summer palace high up in the meadows above the magnificent old Tibetan fort. 

So Najeem set a camera trap focused on Iskander's bed atop the old wazir's house, the highest in the town, on the night of the full moon.  Iskander lay in the bed with his hand on his great-grandfather's loaded  shotgun.

Just after midnight the moon crested the rim of the valley wall and focused by the reflected light  from the encircling snow fields of the high peaks,  which in turn illuminated the details of the jagged lower peaks and the iridescent serpent of the young Indus River far below on the valley floor. The terraced fields, lush orchards and  the tiny villages became clearly visible in the moonshine. Fifteen minutes later a giant wingspan came into view soaring along the predicted flight path. The young men nodded to each other to confirm their shared vision  and watched as it came on across the valley. The creature stayed high and did not deviate. Both men prepared to shoot, when suddenly the angle of the wings changed transforming the direction and speed of flight, too fast for the night  vision camera to follow. Najeem looked up blinking, trying to adjust his now unaided eyes. He tried desperately to focus on the bed, he was instinctively disturbed by the unexpected quiet. He saw the great span of wings powering down on the air to break, stop and climb. At the base of the dive he witnessed the great talons slide  effortlessly and deep into Iskander's uplifted chest and carry him up into the heavens.